Monday, May 21, 2012

There is a new book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life andBusiness, by a New York Times staff
writer Charles Duhigg. It’s garnering significant
popular interest.

The book’s theme of habit, as it is
being understood in the light of the new sciences—neuroscience and evolutionary psychology
in particular—both encourages me and worries me. I’m encouraged that according to the author’s
reporting, it is possible for each of us to break bad habits and to establish
more beneficial habits. But I’m worried
by a new generation of marketers who are tapping into and exploiting our habit-making
tendencies.

Setting the encouragements and worries
aside, this portal into the power of habit is one more tool for
self-understanding offering special insight into the conundrum of free-will.

Free-will

Free-will is the keystone of
Unitarianism. In the latter years of the
Enlightenment, c. 1800, when the liberals of the New England Church were
applying reasonable inquiry into the established religious tradition of the
Puritan worldview they inherited, emerging liberals came up with a number of
realizations centered on notions of

the
inherent goodness of humankind
— in the image of God

and the essential freedom of the individual
to choose her or his way—salvation by character.

This patently optimistic outlook long defined for me what being a
Unitarian embodies.

However, I’ve never been totally
comfortable with declaring the inherent goodness of the human condition. There are certainly exceptions to the goodness
rule: I’ve looked evil in the face of a few my fellow kind. And in the broader theological context, the
Christian tradition, especially the Protestant redactions, rebellion and
sinfulness are central to the various systems of reconciliation. (According to the New England Primer, the
Puritan text for teaching children, A is for Adam: ‘In Adams fall we sinned
all.”) A frequent criticism of liberal
religion is its lack of understanding evil and sin.

As a Unitarian preacher through several
decades, I’ve lifted up freedom. I
maintained that we are essentially in control of our own lives. We cultivate the free mind to know what is
true and accordingly we form our actions.
Such is our nature and with nurture we can be virtuous, living out a
noble and purposeful life, while shaping a just society. So I've long declared.

Recently, I’ve been changing my
understanding of the nature of the human condition, rethinking, at the very
least, the old theological dichotomy between innate depravity and inherent
goodness. We need new terms or
categories that can incorporate the insights of the new sciences regarding the
human condition.

My thinking began to change two decades
ago when neuroscience and socio-biology, as it was then called, began to reveal
how we are hardwired and respond so often from instincts that have assured our
species survival. Tom Wolfe, a favorite
writer/public intellectual, in a 1996 article in Forbes magazine declared
dramatically “Sorry, Your Soul just Died.”
He was referring to the results and promise of the new sciences that were
influencing me, too. In a reductionist way,
he declared the mind/psyche/soul conjunction a temporary result of
electro-chemical reactions in the brain.
Wolfe correctly declared that the new sciences not only eroded the
traditionalist construct of immortal soul, it altered the liberal belief in
the concepts of freedom and free-will. The
ox of science gored in two diametrically opposed positions.

Recently, I’ve been shaken out of my
complacent attitudes—what a friend once called those goddamned Unitarian
platitudes—by a leading evolutionary psychology, Jonathan Haidt,
who points out that one per cent of the human population is
psychopathic—outside by the “normal’ instincts of empathy and compassion. I’ve also pondering brain imagery findings
that we act before we think—that our actions come from the unconscious after we
instantly rationalize what we do.

I am sobered by this, and yes, also
humbled.

The
Power of Habit
further sobers and humbles me about the human condition. Research suggests that much of what we do,
40-45 per cent of our behavior, is conditioned by habit, and for good reason, as
explained by the book’s author Charles Duhigg in a recent New York
Times Magazine article.

“An M.I.T. neuroscientist named
Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more
than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with
chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was
positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a
rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the
center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at
walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find
it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication
it was working hard to find the treat.

“The probes in the rats’ heads,
however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze,
its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched
a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As
the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually
stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the
maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected
occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental
activitydecreased.As the path became more and more
automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.

‘This process, in which the
brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called
“chunking.” There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on
every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush
before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids’ lunch, are a
little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it’s remarkable to
realize that a habit could have emerged at all.” […]

“The process within our brains
that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that
tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there
is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is
a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth
remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue,
routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become
neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique
about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological
studies like the ones in [the] lab have revealed that some cues span just
milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that
a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely
noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after
successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen
so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our
neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

“Habits aren’t destiny — they
can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is
established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in
decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new
cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.”

Putting Habits to the Test

Cue. Routine.
Reward. These are the three parts
of habit-building that the author applied to his own life. He had been putting on weight, in part by
having an afternoon cookie break. So he
began to analyze the cue, routine, and reward aspects of this behavior. He kept something of a journal and tried
experimental behavior. Everyday around
3:30, he’d leave his work station and mosey over to the cafeteria where he’d
eat a cookie in the company of his fellow journalists. The cue was 3:30. He came to realize, however, that the cookie
wasn’t the reward, but the routine. The
actual reward was socializing with colleagues and friends. With that realization he was able to eventually
omit the cookie.

Reading this, I wondered if
church-going here at UCH works like this: The cue, 10:30. The routine, sitting through an hour or so of
words and music structured as a worship service. The reward, coffee hour and its connection/reconnection
with kindred spirits.

Like a marketer, I mused about
the ways habit forming strategies might be a way of building and sustaining a
congregation. One of the author’s
examples of corporate-like habits is the very successful/influential Saddleback Church in Riverside, Califorinia.

It’s marketing, based upon “how
companies learn our secrets,” that raises the specter of an Orwellian landscape
that we much traverse almost in every moment.
One of the best companies in this habit building area is the
merchandiser TARGET.

The example the author uses
relates to pregnant women and data mining.
The marketers wanted to identify that a woman was pregnant in her second
trimester, then to send her via whatever channels available, coupons and
incentives to get her into the store and begin to use it for a variety of
purchases.

Here’s the drill, as described
by the author in the aforementioned New Times Magazine article:

“[A] fictional Target shopper
named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter
lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium
supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that
she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s
more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to
trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it
will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in
the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And
they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a
free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

“In the past, that knowledge
had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target,
and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But
now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering
Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including
offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at
her stage of pregnancy might need.

“[Target] applied [t]his
program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon
had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they
could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related
products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start
pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well.” …

“In other words, if Target
piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and rewards they already knew
got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks — then they could insert a new
routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for
something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that
off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her
with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys
somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the
habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

“Soon after the new ad campaign
began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded.”

My counsel today is “be informed and aware,” so you can

change
undesirable habits

not be exploited by marketers.

On a more existential level, habit is grist
for the “know thyself” mill: “ponder what it means to be free.”

I conclude with a poem by W. H. Auden.
Written in 1940, it resonates in 2012.

New Kindle essay: Teaching the World to Die

UU Attitudes about Death

now a Kindle ebook

click image to Amazon

101 Reasons I'm a UU

101, one-paragraph sketches offer Ed's and Jeff's personal approaches to Unitarian Universalism, while providing a sweeping perspective of two centuries and more of a living tradition both authors dearly love. They have crafted an accessible and entertaining collection. [see preview or buy atAmazon] New KINDLE edition.